KTG Agrar expands cultivable land for agricultural raw materials significantly
Cultivable land increases by 2,320 ha to 19,800 ha in Q1 2008
Hamburg, 24 April 2008 – KTG Agrar AG continued to expand its cultivable land in the first quarter of 2008 and clearly strengthened its position as a leading agricultural company in Europe. Some 2,320 hectares were added to the company’s cultivable land in the first three months of the year. As of 31 March, a total of approx. 19,800 hectares were available to the company for the cultivation of market crop such as grain, corn and rape.
Most of the new land is located in Germany. Three agricultural enterprises farming approximately 1,800 hectares of cultivable land under 10+-year leases were taken over in Brandenburg. In Lithuania, the company’s total land increased by 520 hectares to 3,700 hectares in the first three months of the year. As KTG Agrar expects land prices in this EU country to increase further in the coming years, the company is currently buying primarily arable land here ? 340 hectares have been acquired in the past three months. Some 15 percent of the new land and of the total land are owned by the company. KTG Agrar plans to further expand the total cultivable land as well as the percentage of own land in the coming months. In the past nine months, the total land increased by approx. 6,000 hectares. This represents a 40 percent increase in the company’s cultivable land, which is the most important means of production in the agricultural sector. KTG Agrar has thus laid the foundation for boosting the production of agricultural raw materials.
“Fourteen years ago, we started out with 500 hectares. Over the years, we have grown our company step by step and today produce over 200,000 tonnes of grain, rape, corn and biomass on almost 20,000 hectares,” says Siegfried Hofreiter, CEO of KTG Agrar. The long-standing experience in the valuation of land and companies is today an important advantage of KTG Agrar. Over the past years, the company has collected comprehensive data on the composition of the soil and on precipitation; in addition, KTG Agrar has the required expertise for the successful restructuring of agricultural enterprises as well as an extensive network of contacts. “It is not difficult to buy land. Evaluating it properly and farming it successfully is quite a different challenge. Especially in large-scale farming, you need a lot of experience to achieve economical and resource-efficient production.”